Your dedication to keeping your sister safe during such highly lethal suicide attempts (burning, hanging, cutting, and overdosing) is incredibly crucial.
In a patient with a 7-year history of schizophrenia, suicidal behavior is a critical emergency. It is often driven by active command hallucinations, severe depressive episodes (post-schizophrenic depression), or profound feelings of isolation, guilt, and unfulfilled life desires. While her past relationships or longings to get married play a significant psychological role, severe and repeated suicide attempts are primarily driven by acute clinical distress from her underlying psychiatric condition.
Next Steps
Immediate Psychiatric Re-evaluation: Take your sister to her treating psychiatrist urgently. Because she has resorted to multiple highly lethal means, a medication review, optimization of antipsychotics, or consideration of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to rapidly bring down suicidal intent is required.
Prioritize Clinical Treatment Over Revealing Her Secrets: Do not rush to inform your parents about her past relationships or intimate life right now. Adding family conflict or exposing her secrets will drastically increase her psychological distress, guilt, and immediate suicide risk. Focus strictly on her medical management first.
Strict Caregiver Alliance: Talk to the doctor yourself about the family's resistance to increasing medication. Let the psychiatrist explain the life-saving necessity of medication optimization directly to the rest of the family to get them on board.
Health Tips
A patient with a history of multiple high-lethality attempts cannot be left unsupervised under any circumstances.
Complete Environmental Safety: Remove all sharp objects, ropes, ropes/cloth lines, matchboxes, lighters, and toxic household chemicals from her reach.
Supervise All Medications: Keep all her prescription pills under strict lock and key. Administer every single dose directly to ensure she does not stockpile them for a future overdose attempt.